


Capistrano

by blue_morning



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Down to Agincourt Secret Santa 2015, DtA, Fanfic of Fanfic, Inspired by Down to Agincourt Series - seperis, M/M, chickadees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 02:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5567758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_morning/pseuds/blue_morning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Home" can be an unclear concept, but eventually you figure it out. (And chickadees like muffins.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Capistrano

**Author's Note:**

  * For [livinginthequestion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/livinginthequestion/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Thousand Lights in Space](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2664854) by [seperis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis). 



> My DtA Secret Santa gift to livinginthequestion. (And my first ever fic.) I hope you like it, Freckles! Happy Insert Winter Celebration of Your Choice. :)
> 
> This story takes place the morning after the infamous couch scene.

 

Day 144

Christina closes the door of the mess behind her, leaving behind the smell of coffee and powdered eggs and the small explosions of laughter from Joe and Amanda as they tell some story to Brenda and Liz. (It’s highly amusing, judging from the shocked squeals it elicits.) She’s not in the mood for company, so she turns in the opposite direction from her cabin, pulling her long brown braid out of the collar of her coat.

She picks at her blueberry muffin as she follows the pathway worn through the snow, past Dean and Cas’s cabin, where she’d stood in the kitchen an hour before dawn while Kyle gave their patrol report to Cas, Dean presumably being the unmoving lump under blankets on the couch.

It’s still cold. The sun’s been up for couple of hours now, but Christina is too wired for sleep. The snow stopped last night at dusk, but the wind has piled it up in drifts against cabins and across pathways. As she passes the last of the inhabited cabins, the well-trodden path narrows to a single line of footprints, fresh in the snow.

She wraps the muffin in a napkin and puts her cold hands into her pockets as she walks. Here at the edge of camp it’s very still, the songs of the chickadees and the occasional call of a crow the only noise. The warded wall is to her left; there’s no snow on it. Though the wards emit no heat, there’s the faintest shimmer in the air above the wall, a barely perceptible vibration that makes the snow fall to either side so the top is bare. She’s never seen a bird land on the wall, come to think of it. The chickadees keep to the trees.

They’re flitting from branch to branch now, following her—they know the routine. They’d been shy at first when she started feeding them, but now they’ll stay put on a branch four or five feet away before darting in to snatch the crumbs from her palm. They’re almost weightless when they land, puffballs of feathers, only the pinch of tiny claws on her fingers to prove they’re really there.

They remind her of home—of before. Of walking through the woods behind the house in a northern Michigan winter with her sister, afternoon sun hanging low in the sky. Kelsey with her pockets full of sunflower seeds and cigarettes, Christina feeding the chickadees and Kels smoking with extravagant gestures, dissecting the social strata of the senior class as clinically as any anthropologist.

Christina crumbles some of the muffin into her hand and stands with her palm outstretched. A chickadee flits over from a branch, grabs a beakful and flies off.

“Well, it appears that _something_ will eat Brenda’s cooking.” a voice says, drily.

Christina turns to see Cas standing there. His parka is open and there’s a knife in the sheath on his belt. She wonders what he’s doing out here, but doesn’t remark on the bloody handkerchief wrapped around his left hand.

“Her muffins aren’t that bad, really,” she says. He lifts an eyebrow at that. “I ate the blueberries out of it first, and the birds don’t mind that the rest is kind of dry.”

“‘Kind of dry’ seems unduly charitable,“ Cas says.

“Yeah, well it could be worse, we could still be eating stuff made by...”

“Zack,” he finishes, and they both smile. Another bird swoops down and lands in her hand briefly. When she raises her eyes, Cas is looking directly at her.

“You come out here most mornings,” he says.

“Yeah,” she answers, not bothering to ask how he knows. He just seems to know everything that goes on in the camp, and what he doesn’t know, Alicia tells him. “It’s peaceful. I can think out here. It reminds me of home, but in a good way. It helps.” She smiles as two chickadees land on her hand at the same time. “They’re pretty tame.”

He’s looking at her still, focused but smiling, and it occurs to her he’s different now. He used to intimidate her: sarcastic and mean, no kindness in him. She’d only seen him smile once before when it hadn’t seemed spiteful or mocking. She had gone along with Zoe to one of his parties—orgies, whatever—tempted more by the thought of oblivion via pot and Eldritch Horror rather than the sex, but she’d shucked out of her clothes willingly enough, sitting on the floor in her bra and panties, leaning against the couch getting giggly after half a joint, watching with heavy-lidded eyes as the others removed clothing. Watching Cas smile at Alicia, open and affectionate, before kissing her.

“Humans first domesticated birds thousands of years ago,” Cas says, interrupting her thoughts. "There are Egyptian hieroglyphics of pigeons. In time, they learned how to use their homing instincts for communication purposes.”

Christina snickers. “So, Hippofucker wrote home to mom via pigeon?”

“Perhaps,” he says, his head tilted slightly. (Birdlike, she thinks, but not a songbird. A hawk, an eagle, a raptor.)

“The Roman writer Frontinus—when he wasn’t writing about aqueducts—wrote about the use of carrier pigeons by Julius Caesar. There was a columbarium in Rome that housed over five thousand pigeons. Though I suppose some of them ended up on dinner plates.”

“So returning home could be dangerous,” she says.

“It’s always dangerous. I’m sure there are cats in Capistrano. But instinct wins every time. They always go home.”

She crumbles the remains of the muffin onto the path at her feet and dusts off her hands. The birds can feed themselves the rest. By unspoken agreement, they set off towards the cabins.

Dean is standing on the porch, a mouldy-looking green blanket thrown over his shoulders, coffee mug in his hand. ( _Dean is here. Home is here_ _._ That’s Cas’s equation, she’s sure of it.) She can't see Cas's face, but she can see Dean's. He smiles at Cas. It’s warm and lazy and predatory.

“Took you long enough,” he says to Cas as they get closer and then shifts his gaze to her, “Hey, Christina.”

“Hey,” she answers, looking up at him speculatively, his friendly tone throwing her. Cas isn’t the only one who seems different now.

Cas stops. “Would you like some coffee?” he asks her, looking like he might really mean it.

But Christina’s seen Dean’s face. There’s no power in the universe that could make her third-wheel these two.

“No thanks, I’m pretty tired. I’m gonna head home.”

Cas smiles at her again ( _again_ ) and squeezes her arm. He climbs the steps onto the porch and follows Dean inside.

The exhaustion of night patrol finally catches up with her as she makes her way back to her own cabin. Zoe and Penn are out. She finds, to her surprise, that she’s a little sad to have missed them after all.

Christina undresses quickly and climbs under the duvet she won from Phil one unprecedentedly lucky night at poker. She thinks about Dean’s smile when he caught sight of Cas, and the way Cas’s shoulders relaxed as he climbed the porch steps. She thinks about how for the first time since she arrived at Chitaqua, she called her cabin “home.”

When she finally falls asleep, she dreams of swallows flying in over the ocean.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to aerialiste for her wonderful beta. Thanks also to kitt3nz and AgentFreeWill for excellent suggestions.
> 
> Thank you, seperis, for Down to Agincourt.


End file.
